Yesterday, students in Quebec marked their 100th day of an unlimited general strike, the culmination of North America’s largest student movement in years.

Students have been organizing against tuition hikes for nearly one and a half years, when the Quebec government first proposed to raise tuition fees by 75% over five years (amended to 82% over seven years by the government at the end of April). Before the general strike began in February, protests, demos, trainings, letter writing campaigns and attempts to negotiate in good faith with the government were consistently met with obstinate silence from the Charest administration. For the students there has been a growing sense of urgency and a shared recognition that increased tuition means a heavier student debt burden, hundreds of more hours a year spent working instead of studying, less access for working class students, and a shift in university culture toward the market, the commodification of education, the financialization of student life, and the privatization of the university.

Even if fees increase, Quebec students would be paying less than other provinces in Canada, a gap the provincial government has been aiming to close. But so far every time the administration has proposed to do so, students have gone on strike. Deep in the Quebec struggle is a culture of solidarity and security, a social fabric, a sense of community that endures and mobilizes a powerful defense of their commonwealth.

NATO Protest Photos from Zach D Roberts, GregPalast.com

Update: As of 10:30 AM on Monday, the National Lawyer's Guild estimates that 13 arrests occurred on Saturday and at least 60 on Sunday. Nearly all of the arrestees have been released and have been charged mainly with misdemeanors and ordinance violations.

In one of the largest anti-war demonstrations in the U.S. in years, thousands marched through downtown Chicago Sunday to protest the opening day of the NATO summit. The permitted march, organized by the Coalition Against NATO/G8 (CANG8), ended with a ceremony outside the security fence surrounding McCormick Plaza, the heavily-fortified site where the military alliance was meeting. Though blocked by barricades and a line of police, nearly 50 members of Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) stood in front of the crowd and threw the “Global War on Terrorism” medals that they had received across the security fence, explaining one by one why they refused to wear them any longer.

“This [medal] is for the one-third of women in the military who are sexually assaulted by their peers. We talk about standing up for our sisters in Afghanistan, but we can't even take care of our sisters right here,” Aaron Hughes of Chicago announced to the crowd. “And this one,” he said, hurling the last of three medals over the fence, “is because I'm sorry. I'm sorry for what I've been a part of.” Hughes, who was deployed to Iraq at the age of 20, served in the Illinois National Guard for six years. Former U.S. Marine Scott Olson, who was shot in the head with a flash grenade in Oakland last November, also returned his medals to cheers from the crowd.

As the G8 got underway today at Camp David, an estimated 2,500 held a "Peoples' G8" in Chicago's Daley Plaza to call for a Financial Transaction Tax.

Last fall, National Nurses United (NNU), the chief organizer of the rally, began demanding a so-called “Robin Hood Tax” in coordination with National Peoples’ Action and other labor and community groups. NNU has been a close ally of many local Occupy groups, and today hundreds of nurses dressed in Robin Hood costumes descended on the plaza along with newly-arrived members of Occupy Wall Street, Occupy L.A. and other out-of-town demonstrators.

The rally opened with a parody of the concurrent G8 summit, with an actor playing President Obama greeting the crowd, “Welcome to the G8 summit, world’s largest casino!” as world leaders were seated around a poker table where they proceeded to wager their country’s respective social programs before breaking into a round of “Viva Las Vegas.”

NOTE: The live webcast of the debate between NATO represe and anti-NATO demonstrators can be viewed here at 6 P.M. CST.

When President Obama announced that the G8 summit would be moved to Chicago from Camp David, many believed that this would undercut the momentum that was building for a showdown in Chicago. The G8 has a clear connection to the policies of austerity being protested by the Occupy movement, but NATO's function is more obscure to most Americans: We know that it's a defensive alliance (what it's defending against, in the post-Cold War era, is less clear), and that its primary military role has been in ostensibly humantarian wars such as that in Libya. When you first visit the website of the military alliance, a white dove floats across the screen.

Peace activists in Chicago to protest NATO, however, are unambiguous on what the military alliance represents: “NATO is a global, western-led military alliance that is used to create a checkmate over the Global South and those countries that we see as current or potential enemies,” says Kimber Heinz, an Organizing Coordinator with the War Resisters' League who is here to participate in both educational workshops and demonstrations in Chicago this week. “It is a Cold War relic that is now being used to forge humanitarian wars like those in Libya and also to continue wars in places like Afghanistan.”

Tonight, in an unprecedented event, peace activists will face off against representatives and supporters of NATO in a public debate held at the Pritzker Military Library.

Ahead of this weekend's NATO summit, police are deploying a massive presence in downtown Chicago. A no-fly zone will be enforced in the city, and a “red zone” patrolled by federal agents has already been established. Meanwhile, the results of the NATO summit itself are in many ways a foregone conclusion—the U.S. will be seeking support for a Strategic Partnership Agreement with Afghanistan that has already been negotiated and already paves the way for an ongoing U.S. military presence in the country and continued use of drone strikes in Pakistan beyond 2014.

So what are demonstrators in for this weekend—and what would a victory against the international body even look like?

Mass demonstrations at summits are maligned as a style of politics that fails to bolster local organizing efforts, touts highly symbolic victories and often turns into a predictable contest between police and protesters. And all of these things are sometimes true—but there's also much more going on than the broken windows that inevitably become the focus of attention. Here are some of the major actions and measures of “success” to watch for as demonstrators gear up for NATO. 

I didn't want to believe last week's Gothamist story about Occupy protesters assaulting photographers. But after conferring with several journalists who cover the New York arm of the movement, I've reluctantly concluded that it documents a real and troubling development:

A week ago, several hundred protesters ran through Lower Manhattan on a "Wildcat march" that was coordinated around other May Day protests. Some black bloc tactics were used, but most of the violence was directed towards photojournalists, as several fought with protesters who were attempting to damage their cameras or prevent them from covering the march. A thread on Anarchist News calls the photographers "vultures" and notes, "journalists are fucking enemies." But how many protesters actually believe this? And what does it say that a faction of anarchists seem to be taking a page from the NYPD in limiting what press can and cannot cover?

When I photographed New York Occupy in the fall, I never experienced any hostility from Occupiers, nor did I see any protesters being hostile to other reporters. That was consistent with my experience covering protests over the years, including some with a rowdy anarchist presence.

On May 12, demonstrations will be held in cities across Europe and the Americas—from Rio de Janeiro to New York to Madrid—in a declared day of “global revolution.”

The obvious question is: Can one just declare such a thing? In many ways, Occupy and its sister anti-austerity movements have thrived by doing just that: announcing the impossible and then showing up to see if it happens. Last October, demonstrations took place in over 1000 cities in 82 countries on a similar “global day of action.” This time, the day corresponds to the one-year anniversary of Spain’s 15M movement of “indignados” and is also being used by Occupy Wall Street to link the city budget to conditions of austerity around the world. But the calls for a "general strike" that largely failed to materialize may have delineated the limits of this strategy.

What might such coordinated actions this month accomplish, then, beyond forging symbolic links between movements? Certainly, protesters in different corners of the world have expressed solidarity for each others’ movements—a now well-known sign coming out of Tahrir Square last February read, “Egypt Supports Wisconsin”—and in some cases actually sent emissaries to help share skills and experiences. But is it too hasty to call this a “global movement?”

This week, thousands are descending on North Carolina for the Bank of America shareholders’ meeting. The protest comes on the heels of the successful Wells Fargo shareholder event in San Francisco, where thousands of protesters shut down the conference, and the U.S. Bank meeting in Minneapolis, where dozens of homeowners spoke out against foreclosures. A sequence of direct action trainings and spokescouncils will culminate in three marches at 8 a.m. on May 9, which will converge on the doors of the shareholders’ meeting. There, thousands will protest Bank of America’s laundry list of abuses: funding mountaintop coal removal, perpetuating student debt that has now surpassed $1 trillion nationally, laying off more than 100,000 workers in the last few years and, of course, foreclosing on millions of homeowners across the country. In anticipation, the Charlotte City Council has already passed laws criminalizing protest, as well as camping and carrying permanent markers.

Organizers are thinking about much more than just the shareholders’ meeting, however. Just as important as the mass action are the homeowners across North Carolina who are building a grassroots resistance network that will keep the pressure on the banks long after the May 9 action.

A month before the shareholders’ meeting, North Carolinian homeowner Nikki Shelton went face-to-face with an armed, 20-person SWAT team during the first home reoccupation in the state’s recent history. The action, organized by Mortgage Fraud North Carolina and bolstered by Occupy activists, is part of a growing wave of home takeovers occurring across the country, one that has spread from major urban centers all the way to enemy territory: the suburbs of North Carolina, mere hours from the international headquarters of Bank of America.

In a symbolically big move for Internet freedom, Twitter has filed a motion against the New York District Attorney's Office subpoena requesting information about one of its users, Malcolm Harris, who was arrested along with hundreds of others during an Occupy Wall Street protest that blocked the Brooklyn Bridge. The Los Angeles Times reports that this march has led to about 700 different legal cases.

In Harris' case specifically, the New York district attorney filed a subpoena with Twitter to release tweets coming from Harris' account between Sept. 15 and the end of 2011. By looking at Harris' tweets in the weeks before and after the march, prosecutors are hoping to gain some insight as to whether he was aware that the police had ordered demonstrators not to march across the Brooklyn Bridge.

In a move that the American Civil Liberties Union commended, Twitter spoke out against the subpoena, filing a motion to the court to quash it. Originally, Harris' lawyer attempted to block the DA's requests for account information. But the court ruled that Harris did not have legal standing, with the reasoning that once published, content becomes the property of Twitter.

Twitter argues, however, that the judge misunderstood the way the site works. The court's reasoning cited the rights to dissemination of content that users must agree to--"you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods." But in terms of ownership, such reasoning is in stark contrast with what the social media site's terms of service is based on. The sentence that comes right before the one that the court cited reads: "You retain your rights to any content you submit, post or display on or through the services."